Portable Corral Eases Workload

By

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January 3, 2024

Moving panels from pasture to pasture for penning cattle is a physically demanding task for ranchers.

Looking back seven decades and longer ago, cattle owners did not have steel panels for corrals. Most ranchers cobbled together catch pens in their pastures with wooden posts, woven wire fencing, and homemade wooden gates.

Dilapidated remains of those meager facilities are still in Flint Hills pastures. They get used occasionally with plenty of rusty baling wire helping hold them together.

Not that the idea was unique, companies started manufacturing steel panels in the late ’60s. Varying in design and strength, they were generally available in 10-foot and 12-foot lengths with some 16-feet long.

Before long, most cattlemen owned at least a few panels wondering what they’d ever done without them. The 10-foot panels were most popular for ease of handling as ranchers wired together corrals wherever needed.

With versatile uses, including patching fence holes or repairing water gaps, panels increased in use. They were quite handy for trapping and loading single wayward critters that needed to be moved to another locale.

There was always a need for more panels as purchases increased and panel-hauling trailers eased transportation.

Still, it was always a major strain on the body moving a dozen panels from one pasture to another. While longer panels are often used to build larger corrals faster, their extra weight is more exhausting.

For young cattlemen, moving panels doesn’t have the negative impact that it does on older ranchers. When panels must be moved to a dozen different pastures four times a year, it becomes a dreaded job.

Several years ago, portable corrals were introduced to ranchers who could pull them behind a pickup from pasture to pasture. Not many cattlemen initially purchased the convenient makeshift corrals, but they often shared them with their neighbors.

There has been a noticeable increase in the number of ranchers who now own portable corrals. While a substantial investment, it has finally been determined that reducing body wear-and-tear soon justifies the cost.

The ranch manager recently came pulling into the headquarters with a large heavy portable corral hooked on the pickup. He was excited to sharply reduce the labor required to manhandle individual panels.

Reminded of First Kings 12:4: “Reduce the hard work to lighten the heavy burden He put on us.”

+++ALLELUIA+++

XVIII–1–1-1-2024

Carrier pigeons

By

John Marshall

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January 3, 2024

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The president of the Kansas Senate now heads one of America’s strongest conservative cause lobbies, the American Legislative Exchange Council.

Ty Masterson, a Republican from Andover, a Wichita suburb, has assumed duties as national chairman of the Council, headquartered in Alexandria, Va. Better known by the acronym ALEC, the Council is a predominant hard-right think-tank based in Alexandria, Virginia.

ALEC writes “model” legislation for state governments. Its mission is to free legislators from the task of thinking for themselves by sliding ALEC protocol into state law. After all, what’s good for ALEC is good for Kansas, and it’s better for burnishing Masterson’s power in Kansas and stature in Washington.

“It is an honor to take this position,” said Masterson, who had been ALEC’s vice-chairman until his November election as chairman. “… I just hope that I can approach the challenges we have this next year with the same kind of attack and effectiveness that (former chairman Daniel Perez) did.”

The organization promotes limited government, free markets and federalism. Put another way, ALEC writes marching orders for state legislatures.

*

Before ALEC, legislators did their own work. In Topeka, interim committees were appointed to study an array of complex issues, draft their recommendations and send them to the House and Senate by early fall.

These committees once incubated sweeping reforms for education, state courts, farm policy, tax reform, social welfare programs and more. (In the early 1970s, a committee led by Rep. Bob Stark, of Salina, provided groundwork for a radical change known as “branch banking.”)

Today few committees are assigned, usually for meaningless or redundant work. Instead, legislators wait for ALEC.

Nearly every piece of significant legislation introduced in Topeka in recent years has come from the ALEC. This is why lack of authorship (or sponsorship) on legislation has become an issue for transparency in Topeka. The public is left in the dark.

*

Kansas has a messy history with ALEC. Remember the Brownback-Colyer plan (2015) to junk the local school finance law? From ALEC. The throttling of higher education, attacks on the state Supreme Court, “religious freedom” laws and criminal sentencing “reforms?” All the work of ALEC.

Abortion laws slapped away by the Kansas Supreme Court, and rejected by voters, are more outsider handiwork.

Movements to ban or persecute refugees, to privatize schools and prisons, to deny climate change, all originated in Arlington for Republican carrier pigeons in the Kansas House or Senate. Chief pigeons then were House Speaker Ray Merrick and Senate President Susan Wagle. Today it’s Masterson and House Speaker Dan Watkins, also of Wichita.

Every recent Kansas gun law originated in Arlington. Brownback’s infamous Glide Path to Zero, abolishing income taxes for businesses and wealthy individuals, is the work of Arthur Laffer, the former governor’s pal and ALEC board member. There’s more, but that’s the idea.

*

Today, the flat tax. Again.

Masterson and Hawkins have pledged to revive last year’s failed effort. The ALEC-based plan is to replace the state’s progressive three-bracket income tax

with a single (5.15 percent) tax on all incomes. This defies our current three-tier system that increases rates as taxable income increases.

Numerous studies have shown that a flat tax, like the sales tax, hits hardest those who can least afford it. This year it promises more of the same: big rate increases for the low-income brackets, major relief for the rich.

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The power and influence of ALEC and other cause lobbies sidetrack the needs of local voters. While citizens worry about school funding, local taxes and grocery bills, legislators double-down on dirty books in schools, ghost rainbows in locker rooms, abortion, tax cuts for the rich.

Legislators are elected by local citizens but engineered by special interests. In Kansas, the fever dreams of Washington think tanks suppress the township road budget and ignore the death rattle of distressed hospitals.

Nigh on 50 years

By

Milo Yield

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January 3, 2024

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Well, it’s the new year of 2024 and I’m closing in on writing this column every week for 50 years. I’ve just got four more columns to write to reach the golden anniversary level.

I wrote the very first Milo Yield column for the inaugural issue of FARM TALk, the first week of February, 1974. By my reckoning that will be around 2,600 columns.

No other way to put it — that’s a lot of alphabet, words, sentences, phrases and paragraphs. I figger that the average number of words per column is 1,000.

If that’s the case, then my old hands and fingers have pounded out more than 2,600,000 words for you faithful readers to look over and, hopefully, brighten your lives a smidgen.

It also explains why my old fingers feel a bit ragged and arthritic these days. They’ve weathered a lot of wear and tear — just for this column. If I add on writing thousands of news articles, feature stories, editorials, essays, poems, speeches, class assignments, letters and e-mails, I can easily add on a few more millions of words of hand/finger wear and tear. Why, it’s a wonder these ol’ fingers even work at all!

But, work they do, so I have no immediate notions to quit writing as long as as I’m capable and the writing doesn’t become a drudgery. It keeps me engaged in agriculture and in life.

***

It’s always easier when column material falls into my lap through daily living. I heard one such item just a few days ago at the daily morning coffee/confab/gossip meeting of the Old Geezer Gang at the local Short Stop convenience store.

One regular member of the geezer gang is a humorous, self-deprecating guy, ol’ Bob Doff. He’s a short fellow — a self-described 5’6″ — and regularly tells stories about himself and his lack of height.

I particularly enjoyed the story he told recently about himself and his two much-taller older brothers. He said his dad once introduced his three sons to someone. When he got around to introducing Bob, his father said, “Bob was born in 1955. That was a bad drought year and he got a stunted start.”

***

That story brought back 1955 memories for me. I wuz 12-year-old and the family wuz living on a poor farm on the Osage River north of Bronson, Kan. It wuz so hot and dry that summer that everything wuz stunted, if it grew at all.

We hauled house water all year from a neighborhood well. And, when the Osage River quit running, several families in the community got fish seines and seined out every fish possible from all the shrinking holes of water in the Osage. We ate a lot of pickled fish that winter becuz rations were “short,” too.

***

Did you hear the winter story about the young farm couple who decided to take a romantic evening sleigh ride after a deep snow fell. So, hubby hitched up their team of horses to the sleigh. Soon after they got started, the wife said she wanted to stop by the Jones home. Her hubby expressed his opinion that they should stop by the Smith home first. So, they went to the Jones home first.

After they left, the hubby suggested they now stop to visit the Smiths, but his wife wanted to visit the Johnsons next. So, they went to visit the Johnsons.

Then they couldn’t decide who to visit after they left the Johnsons — and the rift between them raised in intensity into a full-fledged, noisy, chilly family argument.

That’s when the wife pointed to the team of horses and said tartly to her hubby, “Just look at our harmonious team of horses. They don’t kick and bite. They always pull together as a team. So, why can’t two intelligent people, like you and me, get along as harmoniously as our horse team.”

Her hubby gave her a scowl and growled, “Well, it’s because they only got one tongue between them and we’ve got two.”

***

A hired farm hand started working on a big dairy farm as the employee in charge of manure management. For decades he worked for the same dairy doing the same nasty job year after year.

One evening after his work wuz done, the farm hand stopped at the local Dew Drop Inn for a cold brewski and he and the barkeep got into a conversation about their careers.

After a lengthy discussion, they barkeep suggested that they were both career failures. Neither had moved up from their original job.

But, then the farm hand brightened and told the barkeep, “We’re not failures. We just started at the top job of our professional abilities — and stayed there.”

***

Did you hear about the egotistical rural minister who thought that the Holy Trinity should really be a quartet — and he gladly volunteered himself for the fourth position.

***

I read that the president of Harvard University is being accused of plagiarism in her research citings. Same accusation has been thrown at politicians at the highest level.

Here’s how I think that situation can be resolved. Plagiarism is when you steal from one source. If you steal from a bunch of sources — well, that’s research.

After more than 50 years of of writing, I’m sure I’m guilty of both.

***

Personal words of wisdom for the week: “I only made one new year’s resolution for 2024. That resolution was to not make a resolution I knew I wouldn’t keep. So, I’m pretty sure that’s one I can keep.” Have a good ‘un.

Boys Will Be Boys

By

Lee Pitts

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January 3, 2024

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Kids these days are a lot smarter than we were. Take show animals, for example. It didn’t take them long to figure out that raising show hogs was a lot easier, cheaper and more profitable for the hours invested than raising a show steer. And hogs don’t kick, lambs don’t hurt if they step on your toes and you don’t have to worry about a hog’s hair being mussed up. That’s why at our county fair you might have 800 hogs, 600 sheep and 40 show steers at the junior livestock auction.

The problem is there are simply too many animals to sell in one day so they run two rings, one entirely for swine and the other for the lambs and the steers. At our fair they run the two sales simultaneously and under the same roof so it can sound like two hogs fighting under a metal shed while it’s hailing outside. As a parent you really have to pay attention or you might think you heard your child’s hog sell for $12 per pound when actually that was for the grand champion steer in the other sale ring. I used to occasionally work ring at these sales and if it was hard for a professional ring man to keep everything straight you can imagine how hard it is for a buyer who only goes to one auction a year.

We had a similar problem at the video sales I used to announce. Once every summer we’d have our huge four day sale and take up the entire basement of one of the largest casinos in Reno. We needed every square inch of their meeting space to accommodate all our buyers and sellers. But in December when we went back for a one day sale at the same casino we only required a quarter of the space. So they chopped up their convention center into four rooms by moving the walls around. In one room there was a wild Christmas party for a medical group of doctors and nurses, there was a very somber confab of professors and academicians and in the room next door to us there was an end-of-the year awards program for a multi-level marketing group. Then there was us, a livestock video auction with several world champion livestock auctioneers. And they didn’t get that way by being soft-spoken!

One advantage to this arrangement was we were able to cut costs by NOT providing donuts and coffee for our guests as we funneled them all over in the direction of the doctors who accidentally provided donuts, coffee and tea for all four groups in the common lobby area.

You can imagine our horror when we first discovered that there was no cell phone service in the basement of the hotel and this was a BIG problem for the order buyers who made their living on the phone. Although the problem was fixed for all subsequent sales, for the one each group had to make make-do with announcements for various people to return calls.

I was taking a rare short break from my announcing duties and was standing in the common lobby, eyeing the donuts, when the following announcement was made: “Hey, Bubby this is your girlfriend. My water broke, I took an Uber to the hospital and you better be there when I get there.” (Or words to that effect.)

To this day I don’t know from which room came the announcement. All I know is men from all four rooms barged into the lobby and grabbed a donut as they were hot-footin’ and high-tailing it up the escalators faster than you can say, “Accidents cause people.”

For me personally the biggest loss was the suspects decimated the donut selection so that by the time I got within grabbing distance the only donuts left were the ones with sprinkles all over, which I detest.

I don’t know how many men showed up at the hospital or how many leaked into the landscape looking for some high tules to hide in. I do know that a friend of mine was sitting around a table with other couples when his wife said, “You make one move towards that door Bubby, tomorrow I’m hiring the meanest, nastiest divorce attorney your money can buy.”